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Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #2 - "Reborn" (2024)
written by Jed MacKay art by Alessandro Cappuccio & Rachelle Rosenberg
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We've all been there buddy
Doctor Strange #169
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This is the fight I have with friends who go eldritch horror are unknowable. I'm like have you met humans? We know
My favorite sci-fi thing I've ever thought of is something I'd like to call Humans Are Space Ants. Basically, humans enter the larger universe and find that all other intelligent life are practically gods. The thing is, though, humanity's exploitation of physics has gotten so out of hand that they are on equal footing.
Important to remember, the aliens are far, far beyond us. Their understanding of the universe is much deeper, their power is far greater, but we just fuck around with existence harder than any other being has the lack of sense to. And it has had extremely potent results.
Although humanity's standing up to a civilization of a billion literal Cthulus, they're winning. They will eventually codify eldritch knowledge in a way they can understand.
Imagine if ants developed music partly on accident by just doing math about it. You would be so confused as to how they even did that. But they did. And then the next time you go out into your yard you hear the objective single best piece of music you have ever heard, and it's about the ants asking you to stop poisoning their nests before they teleport into your brain and kill you. And they figured out how to teleport using the music. Somehow. Even ignoring the fact they can teleport with music, how could they have composed the greatest song to ever be? they don't even fullly get it!
Basically, eldritch gods watching humanity's bullshit with confounded outrage. I should probably write about this at some point, it seems pretty damn funny/cool
#humans are space orcs#humans are space oddities#humans are space australians#humanity fuck yeah#sci fi
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The oddly specific aesthetic of mid-90s space shows.
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you know that furry spectrum meme. there's an evil version of it.
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I don't actually know the extent of Booster's powers so if he can yeet people into the the next galaxy please ignore
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I was a student at UC Berkeley during the 2000 presidential election. The propaganda at that time was that Al Gore and George W. Bush were exactly the same candidate wearing different ties. There was no difference between them, so you should vote for Ralph Nader.
In 2016 the propaganda was Bernie Bros—and going both ways ("Hillary is an establishment candidate! You're not a real liberal if you don't vote for Bernie!" and also "Bernie will never win! If you EVER supported Bernie you're not a real liberal!").
This time the propaganda was Gaza. "How can you vote for a candidate that is a part of an administration responsible for GENOCIDE?!"
The thing with propaganda is it's always true—kind of. You can go right down the list and see the truth in all of these things:
Both Al Gore and George W. Bush were establishment candidates. Al Gore was the sitting vice president and a career politician and George W. Bush was the son of former president and vice president George Bush, who himself was vice president to Ronald Reagan.
HIllary Clinton was an establishment politican, the wife of a former president, and the sitting secretary of state. Bernie Sanders didn't have the party support to become the Democratic Party candidate on account of his history of independence.
Biden and Harris were in office during the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2023, and the US government has offered continued support to Israel in its couteroffensive.
Those things are true. But the true things were being used to distract the distractible from other arguably more important true things, e.g. that Al Gore's actual policies were more liberal than George W. Bush's; Hillary Clinton's policies were more liberal than Donald Trump's; and a Kamala Harris-led government was going to be better for Palestine than a Donald Trump-led government.
The goal with the propaganda each time was exaclty the same. It wasn't to get votes for a third party candidate or change policy or help Gaza.
The goal was to get liberals not to vote.
And it worked. Every time.
It'll work again, too, if we don't teach voters how to recognize this. It's pretty obvious though. If it's near an election and it's a wedge issue between liberal voters and ultra-liberal voters, that's the propaganda.
And it is 100% active and alive here on Tumblr.
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Has anything actually gotten better, for all the work you talk about doing? Or is it just treading water in misery forever?
Anon, ten years ago gay people couldn't get married in large parts of the US. AIDS was an almost certain death sentence when I was in high school. I was looking at job boards the other day and found a part time gas station job that had health insurance as a benefit, which NEVER would have happened 15 years ago. When I was a kid, hitting your child was extremely normalized in the US and my parents were the weird ones for not doing it. There is a vaccine for chicken pox. I didn't meet anyone who had transitioned until my 20s because it was so uncommon to transition in the aughts, and now there are some states that protect your right to have gender affirming care provided by your health insurance. It's not all states, but it's better than the number of states that had it in 2010, which was zero. THERE ARE TENANTS UNIONS NOW. WE HAVE A VACCINE AGAINST CERVICAL CANCER.
And all of that has been the work of a lot of individuals and organizations and research teams and activists.
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Oh yeah, people forget about this part of Gwen
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I loved this
Batman/Dylan Dog #2 - "To Hell & Back" (2024)
written by Roberto Recchioni art by Gigi Cavenago, Werther Dell'Edera, & Giovanna Niro
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Over 1300 strips later, we finally get Belkar's motivation & thought process. How is Belkar the one that always breaks my heart?
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How To Be: Jason Vorhees (From Multiversus) (In 4e D&D)
In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
Heavy breathing.
More heavy breathing.
No actual words.
Just even more heavy breathing.
Aiiiiiiiieeeeeee!
Jason, In Summary
I’ve never watched a Jason Vorhees movie, which is fine, because it doesn’t matter. He is a big scary weirdo in a mask, from a series of slasher movies, which is why he’s got a cartoony monster man version in a videogame that’s about having goofy fun fights between your Adventure Time and Scooby Doo action figures.
Hm.
Anyway, setting aside the fundamental weirdness at the heart of our brand-driven society that has resulted in the House of Zaslav material known now as Best Relaunched Game Ever, Multiversus, it’s an opportunity to see an existing character reinterpreted in a still-threatening but gentler representation in a funny cartoon fight-game narrative. It’s a way to do a slasher movie monster, but it doesn’t involve a big budget for wet materials.
Jason Vorhees is Some Guy, possibly a zombie, possibly a curse, who died (or didn’t) at a summer camp, and then spent his time hunting and killing campers at the same camp, which didn’t somehow completely shut down that camp, or whatever, which I am sure, if you ask me to watch those movies, I will blame on capitalism. Point is that Jason Vorhees is a force of nature, a murder beast that walks like a man and serves as a sort of genre centrepoint for ‘slasher movie monster mans,’ along with Michael Myers, is a vague outline of an identity. That gives us negative space to work with making this kind of character, which is pretty good:
Jason is big, so probably not a Halfling or Goblin or Kobold
Jason is tough, so probably a defender
Jason hits people in melee with a knife or axe or some other suitably nasty weapon that kills them, because…
Jason is very strong
The Prequels
Now, with that outlaid as our negative space, it’s time to look at the vibes that Jason puts out.
Option 1 is that he’s a big tough guy and he’s scary because he’s very strong. This is the simplest version of who he is, just a big asshole who kills people. What makes him scary in his context is that he’s a grown adult and he’s hunting children. The idea of just outscaling and out-threatening your opponents is a fine place to start. Option 2 is that he’s the kind of spooky monster guy who teleports around and appears around people just in time to murderlate them. And then there’s option 3, which is more a conversation about the horror story attached to a person, a kind of magical ideal that is why he can go to space and drown people in liquid oxygen.
Something about all of these builds that you’re going to have to grapple with for your own choices is the way that Jason is a character with almost nothing going on. There’s room to interpret stuff, but Jason as a person has no hobbies, no personal interests, maybe some modest trauma, but nothing that you could meaningfully consider as a personality that informs other interests and skills.
I can think of a few things that kind of ‘work’ for his secondary interests – the places you build the skills out of – where he could be seen as some kind of woodsman or hunter, someone who spends a lot of time in the outback foraging for food (if he needs it) and hanging out with animals. I could imagine a sort of Ranger package there, which gives a modest direction for the types of builds he could have.
Most importantly, you want to remember, you’re going to be playing a character inspired by Jason. Jason Vorhees is a cipher of a character, a bad consequence that happens to people, and you can work with that, you can happen to people. What you don’t want to do though is create a character who can’t do anything but happen to people. You need to be able to hold a conversation, you need to be able to engage with people, and you need to have something to do when you’re not killing people. The bulk of the game engine handles combat; you need to make sure you’re handling everything else.
Class is going to inform a lot of that!
Build 1 – Fighter
If you want to focus on the ‘scary dude’ element.
Good news: This works out of the box. Big weapon, heavy armour, move like a slightly threatening brick and just make sure to close on people and mess them up. Jason as exists kinda already works like a fighter in combat in that he’s not subtle or stealthy, he’s not prone to demonstrating any kind of wit or cunning in how he sneaks up on people. He just appears where people aren’t expecting and messes them up, which is, largely, pretty easy when he’s hunting down people who are, for lack of a better term, pretty stupid.
Decent, it’ll do.
Build 2 – Knight
If you want to focus on the teleportation.
That Jason teleports seems to be an interesting byproduct of a medium shift. When you’re dealing with a movie, you can always just use cuts or body doubles to make someone capable of moving too fast for an actual human body to transfer. This is a way that movies play with time, where a character can sneak up on someone while a moment is held for longer than that movie even existed – a character can be paralysed in place looking at a corpse and the actual time that takes is much shorter.
But as an effect of that, Jason is represented as teleporting around. Teleporting is a thing you can either do really easily in D&D 4e or it’s hard to get your hands on. For example, if you only want to teleport at all you can take a Tiefling, at level 10 take the feat Secrets of Belial, and then use that to take Ethereal Sidestep. That’s an at-will move-action teleport, and you can use items like Eladrin Armour, Gloves of Dimensional Repulsion, or an Eladrin Ring of Passage to turn teleport 1 to teleport 5. This means that almost anyone can be a fairly fast-moving teleporter.
That’s okay, and it’s neat for ways to use teleportation, and we’ve talked about teleportation at length when we talked about Dishonored’s characters. Thing with that is that’s an enormous amount of effort and when you build the whole character around them. It also makes it hard to be a Defender.
Here’s the much, much simpler build: Take a knight. Get your first magical weapon as a Staff of the Traveller. Beat people with this magic axe-handle. Take the Hammer-Hands stance, and then every time you whallop someone you get to kick them a square (which trust me, you’ll be able to do more with it as you level up) and then teleport next to where they land.
The Knight is never the best option for anything but it is simple and if what you want is a character who is simple and spends their time hitting people with a stick, teleporting into people’s spaces and beating them to death with a big weapon you hold in two hands like a quarterstaff, then this build is a place to start.
Build 3 – Paladin
If you want to focus on the scary story.
For me, I think the most interesting idea in the space of ‘Basically Jason Vorhees,’ is the idea of a character who has this fearsome ghost story attached to them. Jason wears a mask, there’s a way to make that kind of thing a sort of transforming character – that normally, you’re dealing with a Paladin who’s travelling around with a ghostly monster story attached to them. They don the mask, they let the devil out, and the player can create a strict, hard binary between their terrible slasher monster side and their Actually Able To Buy A Packet Of Chips side.
I think this idea is the coolest way to play with Jason Vorhees in a way that lets you play a character who is functional and normal, and even maybe doesn’t betray the scary elements of the character, then have that horror element burst free once the character commits to action. If you want a tank type that works on pursuit based mechanics, this is a rare chance to take the out-the-box Player’s Handbook Paladin and lean in to Combat Challenge.
Divine Challenge is normally a problem for tank types. It requires you to spend your turns closing on your enemy. Since the Paladin is also given heavy armour options, there’s this tension where a Paladin may be stuck spending chunks of turn trying to chase someone down in the battle that they’re not able to catch up with. That tension point needs to be resolved for a Paladin Jason: you need to find a way to make your character tough and able to absorb damage, you need to make sure they’re mobile enough to chase enemies, and you need to make sure that your enemy violating your challenge has a reason to care about it.
For being tough without armour, I recommend Virtue. Virtue is bonkers. If Virtue was a level 6 utility power, I would say ‘yeah, that seems about right.’ Virtue is a well-established and very well-loved Paladin utility power, which rewards you for bolstering the size of your healing surges to give yourself a huge chunk of temporary hit points. Amplifying Virtue could be an essay unto itself, but for quick and dirty builds that want to fire it off and walk around with a huge pile of hit points protecting them, check out the Amulet Of Life. The Amulet of Life means that when you fire Virtue, you can spend two surges and get temporary hit points equal to half your starting hit points, which is not a small amount.
You also need a good Charisma, to make Divine Challenge worth having. As a strength-based Paladin, you have the opportunity to take Mighty Challenge, which means your Jason will focus on one attacking stat and do more damage when they violate the Challenge.
Finally, one of the best ways to at a low level amplify your mobility and damage in conjunction when you need to chase an opponent down, you need to make sure you can charge. That suggests Ardent Strike or Virtuous Strike as one of your at-will attacks.
Now, if you’re at all familiar with how Paladins work, you might realise that this whole conjunction involves picking up one feat, one utility power, and one at-will power, and that holds together all the elements we need to make this Jason build work. The thing is, there’s other stuff Paladins do well, like the great big hit Blood of the Mighty, a notorious hard hitting melee attack that with a little help lets you spike an enemy out of existence in the low levels, like, again, a slasher villain.
This build makes very few demands out of just ‘melee Paladin,’ and the only real thing you miss is that you’re building for Strength, Healing Surges, and without heavy armour. These things are not hard to ask for, they are not unreasonable choices to make, and if you stick within this framework it isn’t going to be hard to continue making your Jason a bigger and scarier threat.
Oh, weapon wise? I recommend going for the hatchet, a woodcutter’s axe just sitting on the back of your travelling paladin, a weapon they ask people to don’t touch that, please. Carry around a defending weapon as your ‘real’ weapon, and you get a shield and a weapon!
Junk Drawer
I swear I cannot actually generate any kind of excuse to make a druid build for this guy. Most of the things you can do to make Jason feel more appropriate to the Multiversus build involve dual wielding, hybrid builds or multiclassing.
Conclusion
There’s nothing that complicated about what Jason is or wants to be, if you’re willing to consider what it is you really want out of the Weirdo In A Mask. Try and do it all, and you’re going to struggle doing any of them. But if you pick the thing that matters to you, you can focus a build around a thing easily and get a lot of options for what you do with the rest of the characters.
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
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